Two baseball players at Soma Agricultural High School practiced after
class. The school decontaminated the ground but the level of radiation
is still higher than normal: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

The seaside in Iwaki City. Fishermen cannot go out since the fish are contaminated: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

A destroyed observation post at a beach in Iwaki City, Japan, about
40 kilometers south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

Inside an abandoned house in Tamura City. Residents and visitors were
prohibited from entering the city since the area is located within a 20
kilometer radius of the plant. The government has since changed the
perimeter of the no-go zone, and people can now enter the city freely: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

A poster of the former prime minister, Naoto Kan, which reads
“Revival of our healthy Japan” on the 20 kilometer radius of the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

An abandoned cow farm in Namie. Farmers had to flee their farms; animal corpses remain in various states of decay: photo by Kosuke Okahara from the series Fragments of Fukushima, The Lens, 25 September 2012

5 comments:

My faithful audience of one, more watchful than loyal if truth be told (oy, can you blame her?), has just now, upon arising with the customary totally intelligible in this crumbling household trepidation, hazarded the thought, here in the 42 degree F. @4 a.m. kitchen, that, er, nobody will have the faintest, as to what I'm on about, here.

Countered stricken, clueless I: "But dear, it's simply... one of the greatest films of all time!"

"A product of the male imagination who ultimately becomes too powerful to be contained by the limitations of fantasy, Mizoguchi's Lady Wakasa is quite possibly the most compelling female character in a filmography that's brimming with them. Totally subservient to the patriarchy, yet nonetheless motivated wholly by her own self-fulfilment (her sexuality is used to ensnare men), her eerie presence in Ugetsu's mystical sub-narrative births all sorts of ambiguities and contradictions that scintillate to this very day. This sequence engrossingly summarises her ephemeral nature: from subservience to eroticism to outright possession."

Right then, so, and as the frigid dawn draws inexorably nearer, with its prospect of weird climate change lightning strikes, a further embarrassing admission, one other thing I seem to have foolishly taken for granted, as though it were the nose before my face, the appreciation of this post, if any, will derive almost entirely from having been obsessively dwelling, as we here in our New Neolithic condition have been, and for that matter who on Earth could not have been, upon the images and reflections thereupon contained and suggested here: